Svobodný software

In response to the likes of the Dirty Frag and Fragnesia vulnerabilities, Rocky Linux is introducing an optional security repository for shipping important security updates sooner...

3mdeb announced on Thursday their release of Dasharo v0.9 for the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 EPYC server motherboard. This is the first time seeing AMD openSIL and Coreboot available for a readily-available AMD EPYC server motherboard!..

For what originally began as an open-source Intel software project, Cloud Hypervisor continues seeing robust development outside the confines of Intel Corp these days with ongoing improvements driven by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, Ant, and other organizations for this Rust-based VMM for cloud workloads...

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc4 release due out on Sunday, a variety of HID subsystem patches were merged overnight to Linux Git...

Vulkan 1.4.352 is out today as the latest minor spec update to this Khronos API. Besides just a few fixes/clarifications, there is one new extension and that is a NVIDIA vendor extension for cooperative matrix decode vector support...

Following Dirty Frag, Fragnesia, and other Linux kernel vulnerabilities making themselves known in recent days, the latest now is ssh-keysign-pwn...

Valve's new Steam Controller, which began shipping earlier this month for $99 USD, is a great piece of hardware. This high-end gaming controller is great hardware wise but what some may not enjoy about it currently is the tight integration with the Steam controller and no native OS drivers currently for use outside of Steam. As a big win today, the widely-used SDL3 gaming software/hardware abstraction library has added support for the new Steam Controller that works outside the confines of Steam...

Dynamic EPP is one of the new AMD P-State features in Linux 7.1, but, unfortunately is causing some fallout in early usage of this power-savings related functionality...

With today's KDE Plasma 6.7 beta release there has been a surprising amount of interest in the new revival of Plasma Big Screen as the TV-sized UI for Plasma. I've been trying it out today and it has worked out rather well, a very smooth experience, and in good shape for making its debut in next month's Plasma 6.7 release...

One of the latest Linux gaming handheld drivers being worked on is the MSI Claw Configuration Driver for controller configuration...

With the new System76 Thelio Major workstation review unit having arrived equipped with an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card, I took the opportunity of having the extra RDNA4 workstation GPU to satisfy a curiosity over whether there has been any meaningful performance gains from ROCm 7.0.0 released last year to now with the latest ROCm 7.2.3 stable release. Here are those benchmarks results if you are curious about the impact of just updating the user-space ROCm components from the end of last summer to the latest ROCm 7.2.3 milestone.

Since March we have been seeing patches from AMD software engineers beginning to enable their next-generation "AIE4" NPU platform under Linux. We still don't know for sure when this AIE4 NPU will premiere for sure in new Ryzen AI products, but the Linux enablement continues coming along nicely for the AMDXDNA accelerator driver...

I have been writing about the Cache Aware Scheduling work led by Intel engineers on the Linux kernel for more than a year. I've also tested out Cache Aware Scheduling on both Intel and AMD CPUs with the patched Linux kernel to great success. And thus very happy to see the Cache Aware Scheduling patches inching closer to the mainline Linux kernel...

In working toward the stable Plasma 6.7 desktop release in mid-June, out today is the first beta of KDE Plasma 6.7...

Sent out on Wednesday was the latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver pull request of new feature code ready for DRM-Next as the staging area ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel. This doesn't yet land the HDMI 2.1 enablement work that's finally been taking place but it is preparing for that with the FRL register headers now in place as part of this merge...

Introduced to the Linux kernel last year was Control-flow Enforcement Technology "CET" virtualization for modern AMD and Intel CPUs. This complements CET that has existed in Linux for quite some time but it's new now to the KVM virtualization world, but some yet to be diagnosed problems are causing some hosts to hang when making use of this virtualization security feature...

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux open-source graphics driver team isn't done driving new improvements to aging AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards on Linux. Beyond enhancing display support for older APUs, transitioning GCN 1.0/1 GPUs from the legacy Radeon driver to modern AMDGPU driver, and a host of other fixes and optimizations for these old GPUs going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series, he has another notable addition that was announced today. These original GCN graphics cards with pending patches to the AMDGPU kernel driver and Mesa user-space can now allow for DRM format modifiers...

The PanVK Vulkan driver and Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware is now supporting the latest "v14" hardware GPU hardware with the Arm Mali G1-Pro now being advertised as supported...

Since Intel Meteor Lake has been the Intel Silicon Security Engine to serve as a silicon root-of-trust for secure firmware loading, boot measurements, and similar functionality. This Intel Silicon Security Engine has been built on with Lunar Lake and Panther Lake as well as set to take on more importance with future Intel hardware platforms. We are now seeing a Linux driver come for this silicon RoT with the Intel Silicon Security Engine Interface (ISSEI)...

Following last week's disclosure of the Dirty Frag vulnerability for the Linux kernel, which only finished being patched up in mainline on Monday, Fragnesia is now public as a similar local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability...